Group Chat Comes To Snapchat! Now You Can Chat To 16 Of Your Friends At Once

The well-known mobile app Snapchat announced today a Group feature for you to start chats with up to 16 friends. You can see who’s present in a group chat at the bottom of the screen. Users are also given the option to start a private chat by selecting individual friends’ names.

What Is Snapchat?

Snapchat is an image messaging and multimedia mobile application created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University, and developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. The prototype for Snapchat was started by Brown and Spiegel as a project for one of Spiegel's classes at Stanford, where Spiegel was a product design major. Beginning as "Picaboo", the idea was to create a selfie app (application) which allowed users to share images that were explicitly short-lived and self-deleting.

Group Chat Comes To Snapchat

According to Variety, Snapchat’s new Group Chat feature can be created while sending a Snap, or when you’re making a new Chat. When friends are present in a group chat, their names are displayed at the bottom of the conversation. Group chat messages are deleted by default after 24 hours, and Snaps sent to a Group can only be opened and replayed once by each recipient.

Group notifications indicate who’s chatting, but will not alert every single Chat they send. If multiple friends in the Group are chatting at the same time, you’ll receive one notification that mentions a number of friends. You can tap a person’s name to start a one-to-one discussion via Groups called a Quick Chat. Going back to the entire group from a Quick Chat requires just one swipe back.

Additional Update On Snapchat

In addition to the new Chats feature, as PCWorld reported, Snapchat is also getting two new editing tools. The first is called Scissors and allows you to cut out part of a Snap on the preview screen and turn it into a sticker. Paintbrush, meanwhile, lets you draw on snaps in the Memories section. One other feature addition that Snapchat didn’t mention in its announcement is Shazam integration—at least on iOS. You can press and hold the camera screen to identify a song using Shazam without leaving the app.